The electronics industry has experienced an ever increasing demand for smaller and faster electronic devices which are simultaneously able to support a greater number of increasingly complex and sophisticated functions. Accordingly, there is a continuing trend in the semiconductor industry to manufacture low-cost, high-performance, and low-power integrated circuits (ICs). Thus far these goals have been achieved in large part by scaling down semiconductor IC dimensions (e.g., minimum feature size) and thereby improving production efficiency and lowering associated costs. However, such scaling has also introduced increased complexity to the semiconductor manufacturing process. Thus, the realization of continued advances in semiconductor ICs and devices calls for similar advances in semiconductor manufacturing processes and technology.
As one example, multi-gate device structures such as gate-all-around (GAA) structures have been introduced in an effort to provide improved gate-to-channel coupling (e.g., for improved gate control), as well as reduced OFF-state current and reduced short-channel effects (SCEs). In at least some cases, GAA structures have been implemented with the use of III-V (e.g., InGaAs, InAs, etc.) nanowire structures. In some examples, a top-down approach is used where a III-V channel material is grown on a lattice-matched substrate, followed by lithography and selective etching. However, because of the large lattice and thermal mismatch between III-V materials and silicon, direct growth of a III-V material on silicon is quite difficult. Alternatively, in some cases, selective area growth may be used to grow nanowires on a silicon substrate. However, in such examples, the growth direction of the nanowires is limited by the underlying substrate orientation. Moreover, in some cases and based on the nature of the substrate, nanowires may inadvertently grow in more than one direction, making single-direction growth difficult. Further, some current methods include nanowire growth followed by manual nanowire transfer to a desired location on a substrate. Such a technique is not suitable for mass production.
Thus, existing techniques have not proved entirely satisfactory in all respects.